Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion

Religion and Other Animals

By Paul Waldau

A March 2008 news item from the BBC, "'Praying' dog at Japanese temple,"
opened with the lines, "Attendance at a Buddhist temple in Japan has increased
since the temple's pet, a two-year-old dog, has joined in the daily prayers.
Conan, a Chihuahua, sits on his hind legs, raises his paws and puts them
together at the tip of his nose."

That the dog's actions might not have involved praying of the human kind, as
it were, is signaled by the quotation marks around "praying," and by quotes from
various people that suggest alternative explanations for the dog's behavior. Yet
the story closed on a note that underscores humans' continuing deep fascination
with the idea of animals as potentially religious: "Jigenin temple now gets 30
percent more visitors than it did before Conan joined in the prayers."

Especially interested in the events at Jigenin are scholars in the developing
field of "religion and animals." This field is burgeoning today because it
touches on many issues of relevance to our twenty-first-century lives, as
religion continues to strongly influence how we regard the inevitable connection
between our lives and the lives of those diverse beings we call animals. Values
and views about animals that originated in religious traditions, often now
enshrined in societies as cultural backdrop, continue to exert great influence
on this fundamental intersection in our lives.

There are ancient precedents for the claim that nonhuman animals have a
religious sensibility. Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) claimed that elephants, the
animal "closest to man," not only recognized the language of their homeland,
obeyed orders, and remembered what they learned, but also had been seen
"worshipping the sun and stars, and purifying [themselves] at the new moon,
bathing in the river, and invoking the heavens."

Today, scholars such as Harvard's Kimberley C. Patton provide theologically
informed readings of many traditional claims about the religious awareness of
other beings. Patton deals, for example, with "ways in which animals are
believed to possess a unique awareness of holiness," noting that "in many
religious worlds…mutual intelligibility obtains between God and animals that
exists outside of human perceptual ranges." Assertions of a special relationship
between animals and God are routinely dismissed in our
human-centered world. But the increased attendance at Jigenen temple reflects
that we are fascinated by our fellow creatures and the idea of their potential
spirituality. In fact, "religion and animals" themes appear in a surprising
number of places—one example is Peter Miller's article "Jane Goodall" in the
December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall's belief that
expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site "may resemble the emotions
that led early humans to religion."

The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be "religious" is but
one issue in the growing field of religion and animals. In the last decade, the
field has also illuminated the significant roles played by religious traditions
in our learning about and treatment of other living beings. The contemporary
relevance of these topics is reflected in the growth of the field—at the
American Academy of Religion, a professional association of teachers and
scholars of religion, the formal group known as the "Animals and Religion
Consultation" has received growing attention, and publications dealing with
religion and animals are increasing exponentially.

This scholarly work emerges into a context where humans' attitudes toward our
cousin animals are more multifaceted than ever. At times, some humans seem
driven by a refusal to inquire about the nonhuman lives within and near their
communities. This refusal is evident in food practices, where many encounter
animals most frequently. At the same time, more households in the United States
today have companion animals than have children. Polls consistently indicate
that an astonishing number of people—in some cases more than ninety-nine
percent—hold their dog or cat to be a "family member."

Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to
the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds
that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice
known often as "blessing of the animals." Some communities of faith are quite
creative in recognizing the pastoral value of concerns for their members'
interactions with nonhumans—some offer worship services in which believers can
bring their nonhuman companions, and others provide grief counseling when a
nonhuman family member dies.

Theologian Thomas Berry suggests, "We cannot be truly ourselves in any
adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The
larger community constitutes our greater self." Growing awareness of "religion
and animals," both scholarly and practical, opens the door to a fundamental
question faced by people of divergent faiths—who will humans acknowledge as
constitutive of their greater selves?